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'Klinghoffer' Composer Fights His Cancellation

Boston Symphony officials are sympathetic but unapologetic. The composer is still angry.

When the Boston Symphony Orchestra decided to revise a program that was to have included three choruses excerpted from the John Adams opera ''The Death of Klinghoffer,'' it said it dropped the Adams pieces only to ''err on the side of being sensitive'' because of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The opera is about the 1985 hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro and the murder of a wheelchair-bound passenger by Palestinian terrorists. More broadly it is about historical tensions in the Middle East.

Partly because of the terse wording in the announcement of the cancellation and partly because a Boston Symphony administrator sent Mr. Adams an e-mail message saying that the orchestra felt that it was important to give its audiences comfort, Mr. Adams and his librettist, Alice Goodman, have responded angrily. Since the cancellation was announced on Nov. 1, they have argued -- most recently in an interview by Mr. Adams on the classical music Web site Andante.com -- that the orchestra was evading its responsibility to put important issues before its public and offering its listeners escapist entertainment instead. (On the programs, to be performed between Nov. 29 and Dec. 4, Aaron Copland's Symphony No. 1 was substituted.)

But Robert Spano, who was to conduct the work, and officials at the Boston Symphony defended their decision yesterday by citing concerns that they had not mentioned earlier. In particular, Mr. Spano and John Oliver, the director of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, which was to have sung the work, said that the chorus had misgivings about performing the work. One reason was entirely personal: a passenger on one of the doomed flights, Ted Hennessy, was the husband of a soprano in the chorus, Melanie Salisbury.

''I agree with all the theoretical arguments for performing it,'' Mr. Oliver said. ''I'd be the last person to cancel something on the basis of content. But we had just sung at Melanie's husband's memorial service, and she was there with her two children, one 3 and one 6. And that was on our minds. Nobody I know would want to enter into the drama of such a piece when we were all reeling. It's purely human. It's not a criticism of the work.''

But Mr. Oliver, Mr. Spano and Mark Volpe, the orchestra's managing director, also said that there was uneasiness in the chorus about the final verse of the ''Chorus of Exiled Palestinians,'' which, speaking of Israelis, ends:

Let the supplanter look

Upon his work. Our faith

Will take the stones he broke

And break his teeth.

The opera had its premiere a decade ago, and since then Mr. Adams and Ms. Goodman have defended it against charges that it is anti-Semitic -- that it presents the Palestinians' concerns sympathetically, with no corresponding sense of the Jewish perspective, and that most of its Jewish characters are caricatures. Among those who have objected to the work are Ilsa and Lisa Klinghoffer, the daughters of the murdered passenger, Leon Klinghoffer.

Mr. Volpe said that the orchestra offered to play another work by Mr. Adams, but that Mr. Adams objected that doing so would give the impression that he was complicit in the orchestra's decision. The decision itself was made by Mr. Volpe, Mr. Oliver and Mr. Spano, who also consulted the orchestra's music director, Seiji Ozawa.

''John is angry, and I feel terrible that this has hurt him,'' Mr. Spano said. ''I'm a big supporter of his music. I perform it all the time, and I will continue to, and I'm sorry he took offense. But I don't agree with him that we did the wrong thing. I, as a person, am deeply wounded, as so many people are, and I think we're being sensitive to that. The fact that these choruses were performed recently in Amsterdam is one thing, but we should realize that the situation is different in New York and Boston.

''I don't think this is about being escapist. It's about being inappropriate.''